When the gale of escaping air had died down, Glaur judged that it was safe to make his escape. He had cut himself a man-sized hole in both the glass panel and the protective grille beneath it. Below were vacuum and - about twenty metres further down - the endlessly scrolling surface of Hela.
He checked his safety line once more, then heaved his lower half over the edge and pushed his legs through the hole. The edges of the glass were softly rounded where they had melted: there was no danger of them ripping any part of his suit. For a moment he lingered, his upper body still inside Motive Power, his lower half dangling into space. This was it: the final moment of surrender. Then he gave himself a valiant shove and became temporarily weightless. He fell for a second, retaining only an impression of blurred machinery rushing past. Then the line arrested his fall, snagging him sharply. The belt dug into his waist; he came to a halt on his back, with his head and shoulders at a slight angle to the ground.
He looked down: four, maybe five metres. The ground slid by beneath him. It was further than he had planned, and it would probably knock the wind out of him when he hit, but he should still be able to dust himself off and get up. Even if he was knocked out by the fall, the cathedral would just pass harmlessly over his fallen body: the huge, stomping plates of the traction feet were arranged in rows on either side of him. One set of feet would pass much nearer to him than the other, but still too far away to cause him any real anxiety.
The belt was beginning to grow uncomfortable. Now or never, Glaur thought. He reached up, fiddled with the catch, and suddenly he was falling.
He hit the ice. It was bad - he had never fallen from such a distance before - but he took the brunt of it on his back and after he had lain still for a minute he had the strength to roll over and think about standing up. The intricate machinery-filled underbelly of the Lady Morwenna had been sliding over him all the while, like a sky full of angular clouds.
Glaur stood up. To his relief, all his limbs seemed unbroken. Nor had the fall damaged his air supply: the helmet indicators were all in the green. There was enough air in the suit for another thirty hours of vigorous activity. He’d need it, too: he was going to have to hike all the way back along the Way until he met with other evacuees, or a rescue party sent out by another cathedral. It would be close, he thought, but he would far rather be walking than waiting aboard the Lady Morwenna, anticipating the first sickening lurch as she went over the edge.
Glaur was about to start walking when a vacuum-suited figure emerged from the cover of the nearest line of traction feet. The figure sprinted towards him - except it was more of a concentrated waddle than a sprint. Despite himself, Glaur laughed: there was something ludicrous about the way the childlike form moved. He racked his memory of the cathedral’s inhabitants, wondering who this dwarflike survivor could possibly be, and what he might want of Glaur.
Then he noticed the glint of a knife in the figure’s odd two-fingered gauntlet - a knife that shimmered and flickered, like something that could not decide what shape it wanted to be - and suddenly Glaur’s sense of humour deserted him.
‘I was worried that might happen,’ Grelier said. ‘Are you all right? Can you see?’
‘I think so,’ she said. She was dazed from the explosion of the dean’s ship, but still basically able to function.
‘Then stand up. We don’t have much time.’ Again Rashmika felt the needle squeeze against the outer layer of her suit.
‘Quaiche was wrong,’ she said, not moving. ‘You were never safe.’
‘Shut up and walk.’
His presence must have alerted it. The red cockleshell-shaped spacecraft blinked two green lights in acknowledgement. A small door opened in one side.
‘Get in,’ Grelier said.
‘Your ship’s no good,’ Rashmika said. ‘Didn’t you hear Quaiche? He had his men shoot it up.’
‘It doesn’t have to get us very far. Just getting off this cathedral would be a start.’
‘And then where, assuming it even takes off? Not the holdfast, surely?’
‘That was Quaiche’s plan, not mine.’
‘Where, then?’
‘I’ll think of something,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of places to hide on this planet.’
‘You don’t have to take me with you.’
‘You’re useful, Miss Els, too useful to throw away just this moment. You do understand, don’t you?’
‘Let me go. Let me go back and save my mother. You don’t need me now.’ She nodded at his waiting spacecraft. ‘Take it, and they’ll assume I’m with you. They won’t attack you.’
‘Wee bit risky,’ he said.
‘Please ... just let me save her.’
He took a step towards the waiting ship, then halted. It was as if he had remembered something he had forgotten, something that meant he would have to go back into the Lady Morwenna.
But instead he just looked at her, and made a horrible sound.
‘Surgeon-General?’ she said.
The pressure of the needle was gone. The syringe hit the deck in silence. The surgeon-general twitched, and then sagged to his knees. He made that sound again: a pained gurgling she hoped never to hear again.
She stood up, still unsteady on her feet. She did not know whether it was due to the after-effects of the explosion or the relaxation of the fear she had felt with the syringe pressed against her all that time.
‘Grelier?’ she said quietly.
But Grelier said nothing. She looked down at him, realising then that there was something very, very wrong with him. The abdomen of his suit had caved in, as if an entire part of him had been scooped away from within.
Rashmika reached down, fumbling through the surgeon-general’s belongings until she found the Clocktower key. She stood up, stepping back from the body, and watched as it suddenly disintegrated, spheres of nothingness chewing into it until all that remained was a kind of frozen interstitial residue.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ she said, without quite knowing why.
She looked ahead, towards the broken bridge. Not much time now.
Alone, Rashmika rode an elevator back down into the Lady Morwenna, closing her eyes against the stained-glass light, forcing concentration. Thoughts crashed through her head: Quaiche was dead; the surgeon-general was dead. Quaiche had ordered the Cathedral Guard not to let anyone leave until he reached the holdfast, or until thirty minutes before the Lady Morwenna was due to fall over the western limit of the bridge. And the scrimshaw suit was to remain aboard: he had been very specific about that. But the suit was heavy and cumbersome: even if the guards could be persuaded to let them take it, they would need more than thirty minutes to get it off the cathedral. They might even need more time than the handful of hours they had left before the cathedral ceased to exist.
Perhaps, she thought, it was time to make a deal with the shadows, here and now. Even they must see that she had no other choice, no way of saving their envoy. She had done the best she could, hadn’t she? If they had information regarding what Rashmika and her allies needed to do to allow the other shadows to cross over, then they would lose nothing by giving it to her now.
The elevator came to a clanging halt. Gingerly, Rashmika slid aside the trellised gate. She still had to move through the interior of the cathedral, retracing the route along which Grelier and the dean had brought her. Then she would have to find the other elevator that would take her to the high levels of the Clocktower. And she would have to do all this while avoiding any contact with the remaining elements of the Cathedral Guard.
She stepped out of the elevator. Anxious to conserve suit air for when she really needed it, she slid up her visor. The cathedral had never been this quiet before. She could still hear the labouring of the engines, but even that seemed muted now. There was no choir, no voices raised in prayer, no solemn processions of footsteps.
Her heart quickened. The cathedral was already deserted. The Cathedral Guard must have left already, during the commotion on the l
anding stage. If that was the case, all she had to do was find her mother and Vasko and hope that the scrimshaw suit was still in a communicative frame of mind.
She orientated herself using the designs in the stained-glass windows as a reference, and set off towards the Clocktower. But she had barely taken a step when two officers of the Cathedral Guard emerged from an annexe, pointing weapons at her. They had their helmets on, visors down, pink plumes hanging from their crests.
‘Please,’ Rashmika said, ‘let me through. All I want is to reach my friends.’
‘Stay where you are,’ said one of the guards, training his gun on the flickering indices of her life-support tabard. He nodded to his partner. ‘Secure her.’
His companion shouldered his gun and reached for something on his belt.
‘The dean is dead,’ Rashmika said. ‘The cathedral is about to be smashed to pieces. You should leave, now, while you still can.’
‘We have orders,’ the guard said, while his partner pushed her against a slab of stonework.
‘Don’t you understand?’ she asked. ‘It’s all over now. Everything has changed. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Bind her. And if you can shut her up, do that as well.’
The guard moved to slide her visor down. Rashmika started to protest, wanting to fight but knowing she didn’t have the strength. But even as she struggled, she saw something lurch from the shadows behind the guard holding the gun.
A flicker of a moving blade flashed through her peripheral vision. The guard made a guttural sound, his gun dropping to the floor.
The other one started to react, springing away from Rashmika and making an effort to bring his own weapon around. Rashmika kicked him, her boot catching him in the knee. He stumbled back into the masonry, still fumbling for the gun. The vacuum-suited pig crossed the distance to him, slid the silver gleam of his knife into the man’s abdomen and then dragged it upwards through his sternum in one smooth arc.
Scorpio killed the knife, slipped it back into its sheath. Firmly but gently, he pushed Rashmika into the shadows, where the two of them crouched together.
She pushed her visor up again, surprised at the harshness of her own breathing.
‘Thanks, Scorp.’
‘You know who I am? After all this time?’
‘You left your mark,’ she said, between breaths. She reached and touched his hand with hers. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘Had to drop in, didn’t I?’
She waited until her breathing had settled down. ‘Scorp - was that you, with the bridge?’
‘Had my trademark on it, did it?’ He pushed his own visor up and smiled. ‘Yes. How else was I going to get them to stop this thing?’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘It was a good idea, too. Shame about the bridge, but—’
‘But?’
‘The cathedral can’t stop, Scorp. It’s going over.’
He seemed to take this as only a minor adjustment to his world view. ‘Then we’d better get off it as soon as we can. Where are the others?’
‘Up the Clocktower, in the dean’s garret. They’re under guard.’
‘We’ll get them out,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’
‘And the suit, Scorp? The thing I came all this way to find?’
‘We need to have a word about that,’ he said.
FIFTY
They rode the elevator up to the garret, the low sun sliding colours across their faces.
Scorpio reached into his suit pocket. ‘Remontoire gave me this,’ he said.
Rashmika took the piece of conch material, examined it with the cautious, critical eye of someone who has lived amongst fossils and bones and who knows that the slightest scratch can speak volumes - both truthful and false.
‘I don’t recognise it,’ she said.
He told her everything that he had learned from Remontoire, everything that Remontoire had guessed or conjectured.
‘We’re not alone in this,’ Scorpio said. ‘There’s someone else out there. We don’t even have a name for them. We only know them from the wreckage they leave behind.’
‘They left this behind on Ararat?’
‘And around Ararat,’ he said. ‘And elsewhere, you can bet. Whoever they are, they must have been out there a long time. They’re clever, Aura.’ He used her real name deliberately. ‘They’d have to be, to have lived with the Inhibitors for so long.’
‘I don’t understand what they have to do with us.’
‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. ‘Maybe everything. It depends on what happened to the scuttlers. That’s where you come in, I think.’
Her voice was flat as she said, ‘Everyone knows what happened to the scuttlers.’
‘Which is?’
‘They were destroyed by the Inhibitors.’
He watched the colours paint her face. She looked radiant and dangerous, like an avenging angel in an illuminated heretical gospel. ‘And what do you think?’
‘I don’t think the Inhibitors had anything to do with the extinction of the scuttlers. I never have: not since I started paying attention, at least. It didn’t look like an Inhibitor cull to me. Too much was left behind. It was thorough, don’t get me wrong, but not thorough enough.’ She paused, cast her face down as if embarrassed. ‘That was what my book was about: the one I was working on when I lived in the badlands. It was a thesis, proving my hypothesis through the accumulation of data.’
‘No one would have listened to you,’ he said. ‘But if it’s any consolation, I think you’re right. The question is: what did the shadows have to do with any of this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When we came here, we thought it was simple. The evidence pointed to one conclusion: that the scuttlers had been wiped out by the Inhibitors.’
‘That’s what the scrimshaw suit told me,’ Rashmika said. ‘The scuttlers built the mechanism to receive the signals from the shadows. But they didn’t take the final step: they didn’t allow the shadows to cross over to help them.’
‘But now we have the chance not to make the same mistake,’ Scorpio said.
‘Yes,’ Rashmika said, sounding wary of a trap. ‘But you don’t think we should do it, do you?’
‘I think the mistake the scuttlers made was to contact the shadows,’ Scorpio said.
Rashmika shook her head. ‘The shadows didn’t wipe out the scuttlers. That doesn’t make any sense, either. We know that they’re at least as powerful as the Inhibitors. They wouldn’t have left a trace behind here. And if they had crossed over, why would they still be pleading for the chance to do so?’
‘Exactly,’ Scorpio said.
Rashmika echoed him. ‘Exactly?’
‘It wasn’t the Inhibitors that annihilated the scuttlers,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t the shadows, either. It was whoever - or whatever - made that shard of conch material.’
She gave it back to him, as if the thing were in some way tainted. ‘Do you have any proof of this, Scorp?’
‘None whatsoever. But if we were to dig around on Hela - really dig - I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually turned up something like this. Just a shard would do. Of course, there’s another way to test my theory.’
She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. ‘But what did the scuttlers do that meant they had to be wiped out of existence?’
‘They made the wrong decision,’ he said.
‘Which was?’
‘They negotiated with the shadows. That was the test, Aura, that was what the conch-makers were waiting for. They knew that the one thing the scuttlers shouldn’t do was open the door to the shadows. You can’t beat one enemy by doing a deal with something worse. We’d better ensure that we don’t make the same mistake.’
‘The conch-makers don’t sound much better than the shadows - or the Inhibitors - in that case.’
‘I’m not saying we have to climb into bed with them, just that we might want to take them into consideration. They’re here, Aura, in this system. Just becau
se we can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t watching our every move.’
The elevator ascended in silence for several more seconds. Eventually Rashmika said, ‘You haven’t actually come for the scrimshaw suit at all, have you?’
‘I had an open mind,’ Scorpio said.
‘And now?’
‘You’ve helped me make it up. It isn’t leaving the Lady Morwenna.’
‘Then Dean Quaiche was right,’ Rashmika said. ‘He always said the suit was full of demons.’
The elevator slowed. Scorpio placed the shard of conch material back in his belt pouch, then retrieved Clavain’s knife. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘If I don’t come back out of that room in two minutes, take the elevator down to the surface. And then get the hell out of the cathedral.’
The four of them stood on the ice: Rashmika and her mother, Vasko and the pig. They had walked with the Lady Morwenna since leaving it, following the immense thing as it continued its journey towards the attenuated stump of the bridge thrusting out from the edge of the cliff. They were actually standing on that last part of the bridge, a good kilometre out from the cliff wall.
It seemed very unlikely that there was anyone left alive aboard the cathedral now, but Scorpio had resigned himself to never knowing that for certain. He had swept the main spaces looking for survivors, but there were almost certainly dozens of pressurised hiding places he would never have found. It was, he thought, enough that he had tried. In his present weakened state, even that had been more than anyone could have expected.
In other respects, nothing very much about the Lady Morwenna had changed. The lower levels had been depressurised, as he had discovered when he climbed aboard using the line that the technician had dropped down from the propulsion chamber. But the great machines evidently worked as well in vacuum as in air: there had been no hesitation in the cathedral’s onward march, and the subsystems of electrical generation had not been affected. High up in the garret of the Clocktower, lights still burned. But no one moved up there, nor in any of the other windows that shone in the moving edifice.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 310